858 HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

There was no reply from the death-like, ashen-gray face and the pallid lips.And meanwhile confusion prevailed inthe house-one running for brandy-an-other sending off for a doctor, and thelike; but Nan took no heed of such things-she only continued her despairing ap-peal with agony in her voice.

" Dodo, won't you speak to me? It'sNan ~-it's Nan that's beside you! Dodo,can't you hear me? It's Nanl-it's Nanthat's talking to you !--"

And at last he moved slightly-slight-ly, and heavily, and wearily; and hisleft hand travelled slowly up to his heart,where it lay half clinched. Then for aspace there was silence, and short, difficultbreathing. When finally he managed toopen his eyes, it was Nan's eyes he foundfixed on his-so eager, so imploring, sofull of the old affection and companion-ship and gratitude.

"Your bull-dog, Nan," he struggled tosay, with something of a forced smile," has been-hard hit--this time->-"

"But you've come back to me, Dodo!-you've come back to me i-you're not go-ing away any more ~-"

"There's a letter," he said, obviouslywith great exertion -" Dick will give itto you .... I never was tired-of Crow-lnn-st->"

Suddenly his face altered-he drew ashort, quick, gasping breath - and thenext second they saw that all was ovel'--all of them, that is to say, but Nan, who

did not seem to realize what had hap-pened until her husband gently raised herand led her, half unccnseious, from theroom.

When Sidney returned, Dick Eri-idgewas still standing by the side of thecouch, crying like a cu ild,

"There's the best friend I ever had,"he said, when he had mastered himselfsomewhat. "And the straightest manthat ever breathed .... I'll bring you theletter, either to-night or to-morrow morn-ing, whichever you like. But mind youtell her this. No man knew her fatherand his ways of thinking better than Idid; and I know that this is the very endhe would himself have chosen. You tellher that. I was in Australia with him.Many a night we sat up talking on thevoyage out; and over there too; and Iknow what he was thinking. He guess-ed that his time was drawing near aclose; and if he had had his choice ofevery way, this is the end he would havechosen, You tell her that. And tell herhe has been down here for some weeks,and just as happy as he could be in see-ing her from time to time. You never;saw a man so delighted. He just livedfor her--"

"And died for her too, as it wouldseem," Nan's husband said. And there-with came the ringing of a bel I, and aknock at the outer door. It was the doc-tor who had arrived,

Tim E~D.

THE DECADENT MOYEMENT IN LITERATURE.BY AHTHUR SYMONS.

rJ1HE latest movement in European lit-1. erature has been called by manynames, none of them quite exact or com-prehensive-e-Decadence, Symbolism, Im-pressionism, for instance. It is easy todispute over words, and we shall find thatVel'1aine objects to being called a Deca-dent, Maeterlinck to being called a Sym-bolist, Huysmans to being called an Im-pressionist. These terms, as it happens,have been adopted as the badge of littleseparate cliques, noisy, brainsick youngpeople who haunt the brasseries of theBoulevard Saint - Michel, and exhausttheir ingenuities in theorizing over theworks they cannot write. But, takenfrankly as epithets which express their

own meaning, both Impressionism andSymbolism convey some notion of thatnew kind of literature which is perhapsmore broadly characterized by the wordDecadence. The most representative lit-erature of the day-the wr-iting whichappeals to, which has done so much toform, the younger generation - is cer-tainly not classic, nor has it any relationwith that old antithesis of the Classic, theRomantic. After a fashion it is no dou bta decadence; it has all the qualities thatmark the end of great periods, the quali-ties that we find in the Greek, the Latin,decadence: an intense self-consciousness,a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a

THE DECADENT MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE.

spiritual and moral perversity. If whatwe call the classic is indeed the supremeart-those qualities of perfect simplicity,perfect sanity, perfect proportion, the su-preme qualities-then this representati veliterature of to - day, interesting, beauti-ful, novel as it is, is really a new andbeautiful and interesting disease.

Healthy we cannot call it, and healthyit does not wish to be considered. TheGoncourts, in their prefaces, in theirJournal, are al ways insisting on theirown pet malady, la nevrose. It is in theirwork, too, that Huysmans notes with de-light "Ie style tachete et faisande v->

high - flavored and spotted with corrup-tion-which he himself possesses in theflighest degree. "Having desire with-out light, curiosity without wisdom, seek-ing God by strange ways, by ways tracedby the hands of men; offering rash in-cense upon the high places to an unknownGod, who is the God of darkness "-thatis how Ernest Hello, in one of his apoca-lyptic moments, characterizes the ni ne-teenth century. And this unreason of

. the soul-of which Hello himself is socurious a victim-this unstable equilibri-um, which has overbalanced so manybrilliant intelligences into one form oranother of spiritual confusion, is but an-other form of the maladie fin de siecle.For its very disease of form, this litera-ture is certainly typical of a civilizationgrown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, toolanguid for the relief of action, too un-certain for any emphasis in opinion or inconduct. It reflects all the moods, allthe manners, of a sophisticated society;its very artificiality is a way of beingtrue to nature: simplicity, sanity, pro-portion-the classic qualities-how muchdo we possess them in our life, our sur-roundings, that we should look to findthem in our literature-so evidently theliterature of a decadence?

Taking the word Decadence, then, asmost precisely expressing the generalsense of the newest movement in litera-ture, we find that the terms Impression-ism and Symbol ism define correctlyenough the two main branches of thatmovement. Now Impressionist and Sym-bolist have more in common than eithersupposes; both are really working on thesame hypothesis, applied in different di-rections. What both seek is not gener-al truth merely, but la verite vraie, thevery essence of truth-the truth of ap-

859

pearances to the senses, of the visibleworld to the eyes that see it; and thetruth of spiritual things to the spiritualvision. The Impressionist, in literatureas in painting, would flash upon you ina new, sudden way so exact an image ofwhat you have just seen, just as you haveseen it, that you may say, as a youngAmerican sculptor, a pupil of Rodin, saidto me on seeing for the first time a pic-ture of Whistler's, "Whistler seems tothink his picture upon canvas-and thereit is!" Or you may find, with Sainte-Beuve, writing of Goncourt, the" soul ofthe landscape "-the soul of whatever cor-ner of the visible world has to be real-ized. The Symbolist, in this new, suddenway, would flash upon you the" soul" ofthat which can be apprehended only bythe soul-the finer sense of things unseen,the deeper meaning of things evident.And naturally, necessarily, this endeavorafter a perfect truth to one's impression,to one's intuition--perhaps an impossibleendeavor-i-has brought with it, in its re-volt from ready-made impressions andconclusions, a revolt hom the ready-madeof language, from the bondage of tradi-tional form, of a form become rigid. InFrance, where this movement began andhas mainly flourished, it is Goncourt whowas the first to in ven t a style in prosereally new, impressionistic, a style whichwas itself almost sensation. It is Ver-laine who has invented such another newstyle in verse.

The work of the brothers De Goncourt-twelve novels, eleven or twelve studiesin the history of the eighteenth century,six or seven books about art, the art main-ly of the eighteenth century and of Japan,two plays, some volumes of letters and offragments, and a Journal in six volumes-is perhaps, in its intention and its con-sequences, the most revolutionary of thecentury. No one has ever tried so delib-erately to do something new as the Gon-courts; and the final word in the sum-ming up which the survivor has placed atthe head of the Prefaces et Manifestes isa word which speaks of" tentatives, enfin,ou les deux f'reres ont cherches a f'aire duneuf', ant fait leurs efforts pour doter lesdiverses branches de la Iitterature dequelque chose que n'avaient point songeit troll vel' leurs predecessours." And inthe preface to Cherie, in that pathetic pas-sage which tells of the two brothers (onemortally stricken, and within a few months

860 HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

of death) taking their daily walk in theBois de Boulogne, there is a definite de-mand on posterity. "The search afterreality in Iiteraf.ure, the resurrection ofeighteenth - century art, the triumph ofJaponisme-are not these," said Jules,"the three great literary and artisticmovements of the second half of the nine-teenth century? And it is we who broughtthem about, these three movements. Well,when one has done that, it is difficult in-deed not to be somebody in the future."Nor, even, is this all. What the Gon-courts have done is to specialize vision,so to speak, and to su btilize language tothe point of rendering every detail in justthe form and color of the actual impres-sion. 1\1.Edmond de Goncourt once saidto rne-i-vat-yiug, if I remem bel' rightly, anexpression he had put into the Journal-"My brothel' and I invented an opera-glass: the young people nowadays aretaking it out of our hands."

An opera-glass-a special, unique wayof seeing things-that is what the Gon-courts have brought to bear upon the com-mon things about us; and it is here thatthey have done the" something new,"here more than anywhere. They havenever sought "to see life steadily, andsee it whole": their vision has alwaysbeen somewhat feverish, with the diseasedsharpness of over-excited nerves. " Wedo not hide from ourselves that we havebeen passionate, nervous creatures, un-healthily impressionable," confesses theJournal. But it is this morbid intensityin seeing and seizing things that hashelped to form that marvellous style-"a style perhaps too ambitious of impos-sibilities," as they admit--a style whichinherits some of its color from Gautier,some of its fine outline from Flaubert,but which has brought light and shadowinto the color, which has softened outlinein the magic of atmosphere. With themwords are not merely color and sound,they live. That search after "l'imagepeinte," "Tepithete rare," is not (as withFlaubert) a search after harmony ofphrase for its own sake; it is a desperateendeavor to give sensation, to flash theimpression of the moment, to preserve thevery heat and motion of life. And so,in analysis as in description. they havefound out a way of noting the fine shades;they have broken the outline of the con-ventionalnovel in chapters, with its COIl-

tin uous story, in order ro indicate-some-

times in a chapter of half a page-thisand that revealing moment, this or thatsignifican t attitude or accident or sensa-tion. For the placid traditions of Frenchprose they have had but little respect;their aim has been but one, that of hav-ing (as M. Edmond de Goncourt tells usin the preface to Cherie) "ulle languerendant nos idees, nos sensations, nos fig-urations des hommes et des choses, d'unef'acon distincte de celui-ci ou de eel ui-Ia,une langue personnelle, une langue por-tant notre signature."

What Goncourt has done in prose-s-in-venting absolutely a new way of sayingthings, to correspoud with that new wayof seeing things which he has found-Verlaine has done in verse. In a famouspoem, "Al't Poetiq ue," he has himselfdefined his own ideal of the poetic art:

"Cal' nons voulons Ia Nuance encor,Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance!Obi la Nuance senle fianceLe reve au reve et la flute au cor !"

Music first of all and before all, he in-sists; and then, not color, but la nuance,the last fine shade. Poetry is to be some-thing vague, intangible, evanescent, awinged soul in flight" toward other skiesand other loves." To express the inex-pressible he speaks of beautiful eyes be-hind a veil, of the palpitating sunlight ofnoon, of the blue swarm of clear stars ina cool autumn sky; and the verse inwhich he makes this confession of faithhas the exquisite troubled bea.uty->" sansrien en lui qui pese ou qui pose "-whichhe commends as the essential quali ty ofverse. In a later poem of poetical coun-sel he tells us that art should, first of all,be absolutely clear, absolutely sincere:"L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'etre absoJu-men t soi-meme." The two poems, withtheir seven veal's' interval-an intervalwhich mean; so much in the life of a manlike Verlaine-give us all that there is oftheory in the work of the least theoretical,the most really instinctive, of poetical in-novators. Verlaine's poetry has variedwith his life; always in excess-now furi-ously sensual, now feverishly devout-hehas been constant only to himself, to hisown self-contradictions. For, with allthe violence, turmoil, and disorder of alife which is almost the life of a modernVillon, Paul Verlaine has always retain-ed that childlike simplicity, and, in hisverse, which has been his confessional,that fine sincerity, of which Villon may

PAUL VERLAINE AT THE CAFE.

be thought to have set the example inliterature.

Beginning his career as a Parnassianwith the Poemes Saturniens, Verlaine be-comes himself, in his exquisite first man-nervin the Fetes Galantes. caprices afterWatteau, followed, a year later, by LaBonne Chanson, a happy record of tooconfident a lover's happiness. Romancessans Paroles, in which the poetry of Im-pressionism reaches its very highest point,is more tour-mente, goes deeper, becomesmore poignantly personal. It is the poetryof sensation, of evocation; poetry whichpaints as well as sings, and which paintsas Whistler paints, seeming to think thecolors and outlines upon the canvas, tothink them only, and they are there.The mere magic of words-words which

VOL. LXXXVII.-No. 522.-87

evoke pictures, which recall sensations-can go no further; and in his next book,Sagesse, published after seven years' wan-derings and sufferings, there is a gravermanner of more deeply personal confes-sion--that "sincerity, and the impressionof the moment followed to the letter,"which he has defined in a prose criticismon himself as his main preference in re-gard to sty Ie, " Sincerity, and the im-pression of the moment followed to theletter," mark the rest of Verlaine's work,whether the sentiment be that of passion-ate friendship, as in Amour,. of love, hu-man and divine, as in Bonheur ; of themere lust of the flesh, as in Parallele-meni and Chansons POU1' Elle. In hisvery latest verse the quality of simplicityhas become exaggerated. has become, at

862 HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

times, childish; the once exquisite deprav-ity of sty Ie has lost some of its distinction;there is no longer the same delicatelyvivid "impression of the moment" torender. Yet the very closeness withwhich it follows a lamentable career givesa curious interest to even the worst ofVerlaine's work. And how unique, howunsurpassable in its kind, is the best!"Et tout Ie reste est Iitteraturo ' " wasthe cry, supreme and contemptuous, ofthat early" Art Poetique "; and, comparedwith Vei-Iaine at his best, all other con-temporary work in verse seems not yetdisenfranchised from mere "literature."To fix the last fine shade, the quintes-sence of things; to fix it fieeti ngly; tobe a disembodied voice, and yet the voiceof a human soul: that is the ideal of De-cadence, and it is what Paul Vei-lainehas achieved.

And certainly, so far as achievementgoes, no other poet of the actual groupin France can be named beside him orneal' him. But in Stephane Mallarme,with his supreme pose as the supremepoet, and his two or three pieces of ex-quisite verse and delicately artificialprose to show by way of result, we havethe prophet and pontiff of the movement,the mystical and theoretical leader of thegreat emancipation. No one has everdreamed such beautiful, impossible dreamsas Mal larme ; no one has ever so possess-ed his soul in the contemplation of mas-terpieces to come. All his life he hasbeen haunted by the desire to create, notso much something new in literature, asa literature which should itself be a newart. He has dreamed of a work intowhich all the arts should enter.and achievethemselves by a mutual interdependence-a harmonizing of all the arts into onesupreme ar-tv-and he has theorized withinfinite subtlety over the possibilities ofdoing the impossible. Every Tuesday forthe last twenty years he has talked morefascinatingly, more suggestively, than anyone else has ever done, in that little roomin the Rue de Rome, to that little groupof eager young poets. " A seeker aftersomething in the world, that is there inno satisfying measure, 01' not at all," hehas carried his contempt for the usual,the con ventiona.l, beyond the point of lit-erary expression, into the domain of prac-tical affairs. Until the publication, quiterecently, of a selection of Vers et Prose,it was only possible to get his poems in a

limited and expensive edition, lithograph-ed in fac-simile of his own clear and ele-gant handwr-iting, An aristocrat of let-ters, Mal lar-me has always looked withintense disdain on the indiscriminateaccident of universal suffrage. He haswished neither to be read nor to be un-derstood by the bourgeois intelligence,and it is with some deliberateness of in-tention that he has made both issues im-possible. M. Catulle Mendes defines himadmirably as "a difficult author," and inhis latest period he has succeeded in be-coming absolutely unintelligible. Hisearly poems, "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune,"" Herodiade," for example, and some ex-quisite sonnets, and one or two fragmentsof perfectly polished verse, are written ina language which has nothing in com-mon with every-day language-symbolwithin symbol, image within image; butsymbol and image achieve themselves inexpression without seeming to call forthe necessity of a key. The latest poems(in which punctuation is sometimes en-tirely suppressed, for our further bewil-derment) consist merely of a sequence ofsymbols, in which every word must betaken in a sense with which its ordinarysignificance has nothing to do. Mallar-me's contortion of the French language,so far as mere style is concerned, is cu-riously similar to the kind of depravationwhich was undergone by the Latin lan-guage in its decadence. It is, indeed, inpart a reversion to Latin phraseology, tothe Latin construction, and it has made,of the clear and flowing French language,something irregular, unquiet, expressive,with sudden surprising felicities, with ner-vous starts and lapses, with new capaci-ties for the exact noting of sensation.Alike to the ordinary and to the scholarlyreader, it is painful, intolerable; a jargon,a massacre. Supremely self-confident,and backed, certainly, by an ardent fol-lowing of the younger generation, Mal-Iarrne goes on his way, experimentingmore and more audaciously, havingachieved by this time, at all events, astyle wholly his own. Yet the "chef-d'o-uvre inconnu" seems no nearer com-pletion, the impossible seems no morelikely to be done. The two or three beau-tiful fragments remain, and we still hearthe voice in the Rue de Rome.

Probably it is as a voice, an influence,that Mal larme will be remembered. Hispersonal magnetism has had a great deal

THE DECADENT l\WVEMENT IN LITERATURE.

to do with the making ofthe very newest Frenchliterature; few literary be-ginners in Paris have beenable to escape the rewardsand punishments of hiscontact, his suggestion.One of the young poetswho form that delightfulTuesday evening coteriesaid to me the other day,"We owe much to Mallar-me, but he has kept us allback three years." Thatis where the danger of soinspiring, so helping a per-sonality comes in. Thework even of M. Henri deRegnier, who is the best ofthe disciples, has not en-tirely got clear from theinfluence that has shownhis fine talent the way todevelop. Perhaps it is inthe verse of men who arenot exactly following inthe counsel of the master-who might disown him,whom he might disown-that one sees most clearlythe outcome of his the-ories, the actual conse-quences of his practice. In regard to theconstruction of verse, Mallarme has al-ways remained faithful to the traditionalsyllabic measurement; but the freak orthe discovery of "Ie vel'S libre" is cer-tainly the natural consequence of his ex-periments upon the elasticity of rhythm,upon the power of resistance of the caesura."Le vel'S libre" in the hands of most ofthe experimenters becomes merely rhyrne-less irregular prose; in the hands of Gus-tave Kahn and Edouard Dujardin it has,it must be admitted, attained a certainbeauty of its own. I never really under-stood the charm that may be found inthis apparently structureless rhythm un-til I heard, not long since, M. Dujardinread aloud the as yet unpublished con-clusion of a dramatic poem in severalparts. It was rhymed, but rhymed withsome irregularity, and the rhythm waspurely and simply a vocal effect. Therhythm came and went as the spiritmoved. You might deny that it wasrhythm at all; and yet, read as I heard itread, in a sort of slow chant, it producedon me the effect of really beautiful verse.

863

STEPHANE MALLARME.

But M. Dujardin is a poet: "vel's libres '"in the hands of a sciolist are the most in-tolerably easy and annoying of poeticalexercises. Even in the case of Le Pele-rin Passionsie I cannot see the justifica-tion of what is merely regular syllabicverse lengthened or shortened arbitrarily,with the Alexandrine always evident inthe background as the foot-rule of the,new metre. In this hazardous experi-ment JYI. Jean Moroas, whose real talentlies in quite another direction, has broughtnothing into literature but an example ofdeliberate singularity for singularity's-sake. I seem to find the measure of the-man in a remark I once heard him make-in a cafe, where we were discussing the-technique of metre: "You, Verlaine l" he-cried, leaning across the table, "have onlywritten lines of sixteen syllables; I have-written lines of twenty syllables I" Andturning to me, he asked anxiously if Swin-burne had ever done that-had written aline of twenty sy llables,

That is indeed the measure of the man,and it points acriticism upon not a few of'the busy little litterateurs who are found-

864 HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

ing new 1"eVUeS every other week in Paris.These people have nothing to say, butthey are resolved to say something, andto say it in the newest mode. They areImpressionists because it is the fashion,Symbolists because it is the vogue, De-cadents because Decadence is in the veryair of the cafes. And so, in their man-ner, they are mile -posts on the way ofthis new movement, telling how far ithas gone. But to find a new personality,a new way of seeing things, among theyoung writers who are starting up onevery hand, we must turn from Paris toBrussels-e-tc the so-called Belgian Shake-speare, Maurice Maeterlinck. M. Maeter-linck was discovered to the generalFrench public by M. Octave Mirbeau, inan article in the Figaro, August 24, 1890,on the publication of La Princesse Ma-leine. "M. Maurice Maeterlinck nousa donne I'ceuvre la plus geniale de cetemps, et la plus extraordinaire et la plusnaive aussi, comparable et-oserai-je ledire?-superieure en beaute a ce qui il ya de plus beau dans Shakespeare .... plustragique que Macbeth, plus extraordi naireen pensee que Hamlet." That is how theenthusiast announced his discovery. Intruth, M. Maeterlinck is not a Shake-speare, and the Elizabethan violence ofhis first play is of the school of Websterand Tourneur rather than of Shake-speare. As a dramatist he has but onenote, that of fear; he has but one meth-od, that of repetition. In La PrincesseMaleine there is a certain amount of ac-tion-action which is certainly meant toreinvest the terrors of Macbeth and ofLeal". In L'Iniruse and Les Aveuglesthe scene is stationary, the action but re-flected upon the stage, as if from an-other plane. In Les Sept Princesses theaction, such as it is, is "such stuff asdreams are made of," and is literally, ingreat part, seen through a window.

This window, looking out upon theunseen-an open door, as in L'Iniruse,through which Death, the intruder, maycome invisibly-how typical of the newkind of symbolistic and impressionisticdrama which M, Maeterlinck bas invent-ed! I say invented, a little rashly. Thcreal discoverer of this new kind of dramawas that strange, inspiring, incompleteman of genius whom M. Maeterlinck,above all others, delights to honor, Vil-Iiers de I'Isle-Adam. Imagine a combi-Dation of Swift, of Poe, and of Coleridge,

and you will have some idea of the ex-traordinary, impossible poet and cynicwho, after a life of brilliant failure, hasleft a series of unfinished works in everykind of literature; among the finishedachievements one volume of short stories,Conies Gruels, which is an absolute mas-terpiece. Yet, apart from this, it was themisfortune of Villiers never to attain theheight of his imaginings, and even Axel,the work of a lifetime, is an achievementonly half achieved. Only half achieved,or achieved only in the work of others;for, in its mystical intention, its remote-ness from any kind of outward reality,Axel is undoubtedly the origin of thesymbolistic drama. This drama, in Vil-liers, is of pure symbol, of sheer poetry.It has an exalted eloquence which wefind in none of his followers. As M.Maeterli uck has developed it, it is a dramawhich appeals directly to the sensations-sometimes crudely, sometimes subtly-playing its variations upon the verynerves themselves. The" vague spirit-ual fear" which it creates out of our ner-vous apprehension is unlike anythingthat has ever been done before, even byHoffman n, even by Poe. It is an effect ofatmosphere-an atmosphere in which out-lines change and become mysterious, inwhich a word quietly uttered makes onestart, in which all one's mental activitybecomes concentrated on something, oneknows not what, something slow, creep-ing, terrifying, which comes nearer andnearer, an impending nightmare.

La Prince sse Maleine, it is said, waswritten for a theatre of marionettes, andit is certainly with the effect of mari-onettes that these sudden, exclamatorypeople come and go. Maleine, Hjalmar,Uglyane-these are no men and women,but a masque of shadows, a dance of sil-houettes behind the white sheet of the"Chat Noir;" and they have the fantasticcharm of these enigmatical semblances,"luminous, gemlike, ghostlike," with,also, their somewhat mechanical eeriness.The personages of LiIntruse, of LesAveugles--in which the spiritual terrorand physical apprehension which arecommon to all M. Maeterlinck's workhave become more interior--are mere ab-stractions, typifying age, infancy, disaster,but with scarcely a suggestion of indi-vidual character. And the sty Ie itself isa sort of abstraction, all the capacities oflanguage being deliberately abandoned

THE DECADENT MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE.

for a simplicity which, inits calculated repetition, islike the drip, drip, of atiny stream of water. M.Maeterlinck is difficult toquote, but here,in English,is a passage from Act 1. ofLa Princesse Maleine,which will indicate some-thing of this Biblicallymonotonous style:

" I cannot sec you. Comehither, there is more lighthere; lean back yonI' head aIit tlc towards the sky. Youtoo are struuge to-night! Itis as though my eyes wereopened to - night! It is asthough my heart were halfopened to -night! Bnt Ithink you are strangely bean-tiful! But you are strange-ly beautiful, Uglyane! Itseems to me that I have nev-er looked on you till now!But I thiuk you are strangelyoeautiful l There is some-thing about you .... Let usgo elsewhithei- - under thelight-come !"

865

As an experiment in anew kind of drama, thesecui-ious plays do not seemto exactly achieve themsel ves on the stage;it is difficult to imagine how they could-cver be made so impressive, when thus ex-ternalized, as they are when all is left tothe imagination. L'Lntruse, for instance,which was given at the Haymarket 'rhea-tre on January 27, 1892-not quite faith-fully given, it is true-seemed, as one sawit then, too faint in outline, with too littlecarrying power for scenic effect. But M.Maeterl.inck is by no means anxious to beconsidered merely or mainly as a dram-.atist, A brooding poet, a mystic, a con-templative spectator of the comedy of<1eath--that is how he presents himself tous in his work; and the introductionwhich he has prefixed to his translationof L'Ornement des Noces Spirituetles, ofRuysbroeck l'Admirable, shows how deep-ly he has studied the mystical writers ofall ages, and how mnch akin to theirs ishis own temper. Plato and Plotinus,:St. Bernard and Jacob Boehm, Coleridgeand Novalis-he knows them all, and itis with a sort of reverence that he setshimself to the task of translating the as-

MAURICE MAETERLINCK.

tonishing Flemish mystic of the thirteenthcentury, known till now only by the frag-ments translated into French by ErnestHello from a sixteenth century Latin ver-sion. Th is translation and this intro-duction help to explain the real characterof IVI. Maeterlinck's dramatic work--dramatic as to form, by a sort of accident,but essentially mystical.

Partly akin to M. Maeterlinck by race,more completely alien from him 1Il tem-per than it is possible to express, J orisKarl Huysmans demands a prominentplace in any record of the Decadentmovement. His work, like that of theGoncourts, is largely determined by themaladie fin de siecle-the diseased nervesthat, in his case, have given a curiouspersonal quality of pessimism to his out-look on the world, his view of life. Partof his work-Marthe, Les Sceurs Vaiard;En Menage, A Vatt-l'Eau-is a minuteand searching study of the minor dis-comforts, the commonplace miseries oflife, as seen by a peevishly disorderedvision, delighting, for its own self - tor-

866 HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

ture, in the insistent contemplation ofhuman stupidity, of the sordid in exist-ence. Yet these books do but lead up tothe unique masterpiece, the astonish iugcaprice of A Rebours, in which he hasconcentrated all that is delicately de-praved, all that is beautifully, curiouslypoisonous, in modern art. .A. Rebours isthe history of a typical Decadent- astudy, indeed, after a real man, but a studywhich seizes the type rather than the per-sonality. In the sensations and ideas ofDes Esseintes we see the sensations andideas of the effeminate, over-civilized, de-liberately abnormal creature who is thelast product of our society: partly thefather, partly the offspring, of the per-verse art that he adores. Des Es-seintes creates for his solace, in the wil-derness of a barren and profoundly un-comfortable world, an artificial paradise.His Thebaide raffi nee is furnished elab-orately for candle-light, equipped with thepictures, the books, that satisfy his senseof the exquisitely abnormal. He de-lights in the Latin of Apuleius and Petro-nius, in the French of Baudelaire, Gon-court, Verlaine, Mallarme, Villiers; inthe pictures of Gustave Moreau, theFrench Burne-Jones, of Odilon Redan,the French Blake. He delights in thebeauty of strange, unnatural flowers, inthe melodic combination of scents, in theimagined harmonies of the sense of taste.And at last, exhausted by these spiritualand sensory debauches in the delights ofthe artificial, he is left (as we close thebook) with a brief', doubtful choice beforehim-madness or death, 01' else a returnto nature, to the normal life.

Since .A. Rebours, M. Huysmans haswritten one other remarkable book, La-Bas, a study in the hysteria and mys-tical corruption of contemporary BlackMagic. But it js on that one exceptionalachievement, A Rebours, that his famewill rest; it is there that he has express-ed not merely himself, but an epoch.And he has done so in a style which car-ries the modern experiments upon lan-guage to their furthest development.Formed upon Goncourt and Flaubert, ithas sought for novelty, l'image peinte,the exactitude of color, the forcible pre-cision of epithet, wherever words, images,or epithets are to be found. Barbaric inits profusion, violent in its emphasis,wearying in its splendor, it is-especiallyin regard to things seen-extraordinarily

expressive, with all the shades of a paint-er's palette. Elaborately and deliberate-ly perverse, it is in its very perversitythat Huysmans' work-so fascinating,so repellent, so instinctively art.ifioial-i-comes to represent, as the work of noother writer can be said to do, the maintendencies, the chief results, of the De-cadent movement in literature.

Such, then, is the typical literature ofthe Decadence-literature which, as wehave considered it so far, is entirelyFrench. But those qualities which wefind in the wade of Goncourt, Verlaine,Huysmans - qualities which have per-meated literature much more completelyin France than in any other country-are not wanting in the recent literatureof other countries. In Holland there isa new school of Sensiti vists, as they callthemselves, who have done some remark-able work-c-Couperus, in Ecstasy, for ex-ample-very much on the lines of theFrench art of Impressionism. In Italy,Luigi Capuana (in Giacinta, for instance)has done some wonderful studies of mor-bid sensation; Gabriele d'An nunzio, inthat marvellous, malarious Piacere, hasachieved a triumph of exquisite perversity.In Spain, one of the pr-incipal novelists,Sefiora Pardo-Bazan, has formed herself,with some deliberateness, after Goncourt,grafting his method, curiously enough,upon a typically Spanish Catholicism ofher own. In Norway, Ibsen has latelydeveloped a personal kind of Impres-sionism (in Hedda Gabler) and of Sym-bolism (in The Master-Builder)-" open-ing the door," in his own phrase, "tothe younger generation." And in Eng-land, too, we find the same influences atwork. The prose of Mr. Walter Pater,the verse of Mr. W. E. Henley-to taketwo prominent examples-are attemptsto do with the English language some-thing of what Goncourt and Verlainehave done with the French. Mr. Pater'sprose is the most beautiful English prosewhich is now being written j and, unlikethe prose of Goncourt, it has done no vio-lence to language, it has sought after novivid effects, it has found a large part ofmastery in reticence, in knowing what toomit. But how far away from the classicideals of style is this style in which wordshave their color, their music, their per-fume, in which there is "some strange-ness in the proportion" of every beauty I'I'he Studies in the Renaissance have

THE DECADENT MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE.

made of criticism a new art-have raised criticism almostto the act of creation. AndMariu« the Epicurean, in itsstudy of "sensations andideas" (the conjunction wasGoncourt's before it was Mr.Pater's), and the ImaginaryPortraits, in their evocationsof the Middle Ages, the age ofWatteau-have they not thatmorbid subtlety of analysis,that morbid curiosity of form,that we have found in theworks of the French Deca-dents? A fastidiousness equalto that of Flaubert has limitedMr. Pater's work to six vol-umes, but in these six volumesthere is not a page that is notperfectly finished, with a con-scious art of perfection. Inits minute elaboration it canbe compared only with gold-smith's work v so fine, so deli-cate is the handling of so del-icate, so precious a material.

Mr. Henlev's work in versehas none of tIle characteristicsof Mr. Pater's work in prose.Vei-lain e's definition of hisown theory of poetical writing-" sincerity, and the impres-sion of the moment followedto the letter "-~might well be adopted asa definition of Mr. Henley's theory orpractice. In A Book of Verses and TheSong of the Sword he has brought intothe traditional conventionalities of mod-ern English verse the note of a new per-sonality, the touch of a new method.The poetry of Impressionism can go nofurther, in one direction, than that seriesof rhymes and rhythms named In Hos-pital. The ache and throb of the bodyin its long nights on a tumbled bed, andas it lies on the operating-table await-ing "the thick, sweet mystery of chloro-form," are brought home to us as nothingelse that I know in poetry has ever broughtthe physical sensations. And for a sharp-er, closer truth of rendering, Mr. Henleyhas resorted (after the manner of Heine)to a rhymeless form of lyric verse, whichin his hands, certainly, is sensitive and ex-pressive. Whether this kind of vel'S librecan fully compensate, in what it gains offreedom and elasticity, for what it losesof compact form and vocal appeal, is a

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W. E. HENLEY.From a photograph by Frederick Hol lyer, London.

difficult question. It is one that Mr. Hen-ley's verse is far from solving in the affirm-ative, for, in his' work, the finest things,to my mind, are rhymed. In the purelyimpressionistic way, do not the LondonVoluntaries, which are rhymed, surpassall the unrhymed vignettes and nocturneswhich attempt the same quality of result?They flash before us certain aspects of thepoetry of London as only Whistler hadeV81'done, and in another art. Nor is itonly the poetry of cities, as here, nor thepoetry of the disagreeable, as in In Hos-pital, that Mr. Henley can evoke; he canevoke the magic of personal romance.He has written verse that is exquisitelyfrivolous, daintily capricious, waywardand fugitive as the winged remembranceof some momentary delight. And, incertain fragments, he has come nearerthan any other English singer to what Ihave called the achievement of Verlaineand the ideal of the Decadence: to be a dis-embodied voice, and yet the voice of a hu-rna.n soul.